A Heartening Story of Collaboration, from rain city

I love my job.

Ok, every day except for the days where I loathe my job, I love it. There’s a lot of face time spent with people doing fascinating work and a lot of time nose-down, eyes glazed, gazing into a glowing screen. I’ll let you guess which days I favour, because I bet you feel the same way as I do.

A year ago, our team outlined the Core Beliefs and Passions of our organization as part of a strategic planning process. We did it to help us make sure that every grant we pursue or contract we land is rooted in doing something that, no matter how many spreadsheets it involves, is something that inspires us.

I recently moved out West to grow My Sustainable Canada’s work on Vancouver’s rainy greywetheart-breaking heart-wrenching shores. The city is growing on me and that’s the story I want to share with you now, but for a while there, it was relentlessly wet and that’s all I could think about. I think Ryan Gosling even made a movie about the rain.

Thankfully, it is over, for now.

Earlier this spring, a contract came up issued by the City of Vancouver. They wanted help figuring out how to address the gaps in the local food system here. I started this job to work on building sustainable food systems and here was a chance to work with the world’s self-proclaimed Greenest City. We decided to bid on the contract. But I told Tania I wanted an “on the ground partner to go should to shoulder with on this thing,” someone who could over my blind spots and help me carry the umbrella.

Enter here, Core Belief #6.

Core Belief #6:
We believe in the power of collaborations and
surrounding ourselves
with talented partners,
to do the best work.

Tania is a smart leader, so she basically asked me what I was going to do about it.

I’ve spent the better part of the last two years advocating that if you want something, mostly in the context of local food, “just ask” for it. So we put the ask out to our network for someone with a complementary skill-set who could cover my weaknesses (morale in the rain + number’zzzz).

Bold to the point.Final moments at TEDx Bled in Slovenia last March.

A few degrees of separation later, Annie Lambla appeared.

Annie had just wrapped up her MBA, had a few hundred kilometres on her bike peddling around the eastern US teaching people about yogurt, had run a grocery store in Chicago, and was at least as nostalgic about her time in Turkey, where she was a copy editor at an English daily, as I was. If you’ve ever wondered what a study in contrasts looks like, I can tell you it feels like a powerful force. My gut signed on in a heartbeat and to our good fortune, so did Annie.

The first good sign for this partnership came when the City of Vancouver emailed me to say they wanted us. She would be the numbers, I would be the stories. Perhaps not so surprisingly, such a clean division of labour didn’t make sense. Two months later, Annie and I have tag-teamed to connect with over a thousand stakeholders, we’ve had generative conversations that wouldn’t have been possible staring at a computer or working with someone who wasn’t as curious and sharp as she is, and yes, she delivered on the numbers – opening me to the world of sensitivity analyses and growth rates. I think she may have single-handedly also stopped the rain.

At My Sustainable Canada, we believe in the power of collaborations and surrounding ourselves with talented partners, not just to do the best work, but to learn more about ourselves, to push our comfort zones, to think in new ways, and to go places we would never have otherwise gone alone.

Field research: Annie getting cozy with the crustaceans as we scope out the BC Spot Prawn Festival for good ideas.

And what sets apart a competent partner from an excellent partner is one who does not just deliver what she’s asked, but who is as ready to lead as she is to follow, when she sees a moment that’s hers. It’s this, and her home-made Camembert, that make me pretty grateful to have Annie as a collaborator for a project that was ambitious, big, and beyond my solo-abilities.

I love this job because when you work with a group of people who share the same core beliefs, and who encourage you to ask for what you need and push you to go find it, sometimes you get lucky and the universe delivers it in spades… or rather, in the package of a remarkably talented, bike-pedaling, numbers-crunching new ally – and friend.

Come back later this week to hear from that smart leading Executive Director of ours, Tania Del Hasta Pronto. Maybe she’ll extol upon us the wonders of her 5 am work routine and reveal the elixir that gets her up early and working in the fast lane all the day-long. Maybe, I said maybe. Wait and see!